World Mental Health Day 2020 this past weekend was not just about highlighting the need for ending social stigma surrounding mental health; this year it was also about checking in with everyone worldwide. After all, it’s been an incredibly difficult year, and the ordeal is far from over.

In line with that, we decided to discuss mental health in the workplace, and what businesses and HR can especially do in current circumstances to nurture a more wholesome and inclusive space for employees.

The Impact of Sidelining Mental Health in the Workplace

Work is great for the mind and body, we all know that. However, sustained work requires a positive and healthy environment, just like all other aspects of life. The World Health Organization describes a healthy workplace as a place “where workers and managers actively contribute to the working environment by promoting and protecting the health, safety and well-being of all employees.” So what happens when such an environment isn’t available and its consequences not considered? A lot, as it turns out. Here’s a quick summary of some of the issues directly attributed to an unhealthy (for mental health) work environment:

• Relationship issues between employees
• Poor performance and productivity
• Poor quality of work
• Greater relationship issues in the personal lives of employees
• Deteriorating physical health
• Lack of motivation and drive
• Increase in harassment

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not only does fostering a negligent or unhealthy environment in the workplace affect employees’ mental health, but the business gets directly impacted while also bearing additional costs of treatments. No one wins.

There is a two-pronged approach needed to really turn things around. Fostering a more wholesome office environment and promoting frank and frequent discussions on mental health. Let’s examine what these can achieve.

Building a Better Workplace Environment

A better workplace environment in this scenario specifically refers to a workplace where employers and employees are cognizant of both the importance of being mentally healthy and knowing that there is a system in place to learn of and seek help for any issues. 

Global and local health organizations stress the importance of implementing good practices and interventions to promote mental health in a workplace. This means establishing safety guidelines and practices into the company policy, as well as identifiers of what constitutes as evidence of declining mental health and how to manage such situations. It also involves informing employees of all options available to them, including training sessions and any medical or therapeutic help they may need. 

Employers can also create a better workplace simply by helping employees plan their careers better and praising them frequently for their work, thus creating a positive feedback loop that helps employees develop their careers in more fulfilling ways and thus reinforcing their mental well-being as well.

This bodes well for everyone who experiences poor mental health infrequently, or situationally. However, this does not cater to those who suffer from mental disorders or live on the behaviour spectrum outside the vanilla definition of “normal”. For this, businesses need to:

Support People with Mental Health Disorders

And truly, the first way to do that is by normalizing discussion about such things. It is the best and most permanent way of removing the stigma against mental health and perceiving employees as anything other than people. As we have previously discussed, a workplace that is high in emotionally intelligent individuals can lead to all-round positivity, especially when it comes to socially sensitive subjects like mental health issues. 

Beyond that, organizations can go a long way to helping such individuals by boosting the support they are provided by the organization’s systems. Such support can range from flexible work hours to the option for working from home, pushing to develop a more positive workplace as outlined above and a secure line of communication with management that is both reassuring and supportive. Luckily, modern technology has empowered HR to be easily able to implement things like flexi-hours, remote working and confidential communications. 

The thing to remember in all of this is that none of this is a one-time thing. Not the changes, not the conversation, not the support. It must be regular and continuous, evolving to meet the growing needs of employees current and future, and it must come through from HR and management.

 

It is important for businesses to understand how to design their workplaces and work culture with people in mind. A planned and considered approach can reap benefits in the form of improved overall performance and nurturing an enhanced climate of creativity and innovation for workers.

While every company will claim that they put their employees first, it is easy to spot the ones that actually employ a human-centric approach to their business practices, both in terms of employee happiness and business success. Therefore, let’s take some time to understand just what human factors are, their importance and how to leverage them into a more wholesome and successful workplace.

What Human Factors Should be Considered in a Business Scenario

Whether your business is office-based or involves physical labour, factory processes or logistics, there are human factors at play affecting the workforce and in turn the organization. This operational optimization is different for various business types. In warehouses, factories or other physical-labor based work, human factors could range from their health and safety, to human interaction with machines and dangers and risks associated with them. In office environments, they could involve environmental aspects (such as office space habitability) or situational aspects (such as surrounding ambient noise and interruptions).

Whatever your business, you need to critically examine your work processes from top to bottom to effectively chart out what human factors are applicable to your organization and its employees. An excellent skill that helps with this is emotional intelligence which, as we discussed in a recent blog, is a transformative skill for the modern workplace. Emotional intelligence features here heavily, allowing leaders to apply an empathy-centric approach to identifying key human factors applicable to their workplace.

Why These, or Any Human Factors Are Important

In a nutshell, human factors directly affect the efficiency, effectiveness and even the safety of your business workplace. Organizations can keep relevant human factors in their purview often design optimally – for instance, installing some sort of soundproofing in the walls if the office is located in a busy metropolitan area, or, providing regular safety training for on-site work at a dangerous facility.

Consider the outcome of sub-optimal human factors: Workers in a noisy environment aren’t productive, employees in an unsafe location may be injured and feel unenthusiastic in committing to activities that may harm them, even an office that is too cold may impact productivity and therefore becomes a valid human factor. A pilot in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft needs a certain level of comfort (environmental human factor) to be able to focus on their critical task – the importance of this factor is self-explanatory.

Only when you are able to chart the negative effects to your business resulting from a lack of consideration for human factors, can you understand their true importance.

Leveraging Human Factors For Your Operations

Referring back to emotional intelligence here for a moment, if the approach to leveraging human factors for business growth or development are from a bottom-line perspective, you run into the same issue as every business that only uses numbers and statistics to determine such outcomes. Human factors are complex and complicated, impacted by non-technical things like culture, behaviours and personalities, all things that are lost when reduced to mere numbers.

The goal of leveraging human factors must be to combine the best characteristics of human beings (skills, creativity and collaboration) with the best characteristics of your business pipelines/systems/processes in a way that eliminates excessive and unnecessary work which can lead to mistakes. For instance, any system that reduces data handling steps will reduce the chance of human error in critical operations such as accounting, finance or payroll. Any employees using such a system would have the peace of mind of reduced errors, and would therefore be productive in more ways than one: working faster because of the optimal system and working faster because of the optimal human factor (reduced stress of mistakes).

 

Human Factor study has been a topic of investigation in various worldwide industries for quite some time, yet even now merits careful examination before implementation. There are immense benefits to getting it right, so long as you tackle it appropriately and with the right objectives.